Thinking of going paperless as a landlord or property manager? Explore the benefits of paperless property management for yourself and your tenants.
As a landlord or property manager, using digital tools to your advantage is extremely beneficial, allowing you to optimize your rental processes. It can make managing your property much easier, simplify paying rent, and make it easier to manage and keep track of lease agreements. Additionally, today’s young renters tend to prefer digital options over traditional paper tracking systems.
With the aid of the myriad of digital tools at your disposal, consider going paperless for your rentals and renters. In doing so, you will find many benefits, varying from cost to time to environmental benefits. Your renters will love it too.
Cost Benefits of Paperless Property Management:
As the term implies, paperless property management significantly reduces the amount of paper you need to use, as well as the notoriously expensive ink required for printing. Additionally, you will save money and reduce the stress of repairing and replacing printers every so often. With ink cartridges typically being quite costly, this expense adds up quickly, especially if you need to print lease agreements, receipts, and other documents for a large number of properties.
Making all of these paper options digital significantly reduces the use of paper, ink, and printers, meaning that you won’t need to purchase them as often. Additionally, storing your vital business and rental documents digitally can alleviate the storage cost of filing and time spent keeping them organized. As everyone knows, efficiency saves money.
Environmental Benefits of Paperless Property Management:
If you aren’t already a paperless landlord or property manager, you can likely attest to the mountains of paperwork in your office or other storage locations. This scales quickly if you own a lot of properties, requiring a lot of trees and a lot of processing. As such, cutting down on the paper you use can have some excellent environmental benefits. Not only will you be helping your environment, but many renters appreciate the effort put forth to care for the environment through paperless property management.
Organizational Benefits of Paperless Property Management:
Going paperless in your property management means you no longer need that old file cabinet. All of your files can be stored digitally on your computer or even on the cloud. Finding files, tracking leases, and creating receipts is easy with digital property management. Additionally, property management software can help keep your property portfolio even more organized. You can track any properties needing maintenance and which are up to date on rent.
You can also market your properties through software, as many have large syndication networks. Marketing, tracking receipts, and other similar tasks can be easily managed through digital methods. Property management software options on the market make it easy to reference past lease agreements, receipts, marketing info, other essential information. This eliminates the need to manually assess how to name your files in a memorable way. All information is easily accessible through multiple search avenues, allowing you to seamlessly access files using the property’s address, renter’s name, or similar identifiers, which will make file organization even easier.
Learn more: Tips and Tricks | 5 Days to an Organized Office
Time Benefits of Paperless Property Management:
One of the most significant benefits you may notice of going paperless as a landlord or property manager is the amount of time you spend working. Filing, or having someone else file your paperwork, is a task that no longer needs to be done if everything is digital.
With the aforementioned ease of organization that comes with digitized paperwork comes time efficiency. Keeping everything in digital file folders is much easier and more efficient than using file cabinets. Searching within a digital file is far faster than hand-filing methods. For those using property management software, time savings become even more apparent. No more guesswork when your accountant asks for a receipt for that expense. Just open the expense, and the receipt is right there. Every tenant and every property has a dedicated file library. Upload documents specific to the tenant or property into their library, and quickly access those files anytime.
Learn more: How Much Time Goes Into Being a Landlord?
Tenant Benefits of Paperless Property Management:
Many tenants love paperless property management solutions, especially young people. Being able to pay rent, request maintenance services, report problems, and view their lease at any time is highly convenient. Additionally, digital rent payments increase the odds of getting your rent payments on time.
Final Thoughts:
The benefits of paperless property management are numerous and varied, from tenant preferences to convenience and security. Streamline your operations and save time – explore the benefits of going paperless.